Radiative Transport Based Flame Volume Reconstruction from Videos

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time flame volume reconstruction method from videos using inexpensive CCD cameras, leveraging radiative transport equations and CUDA for visualization in various applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, cost-effective approach combining CCD camera smear features with radiative transport modeling for accurate flame reconstruction.

Findings

Real-time reconstruction with CUDA acceleration.

Effective synchronization of inexpensive CCD cameras.

Successful application in virtual, augmented reality, and stylization.

Abstract

We introduce a novel approach for flame volume reconstruction from videos using inexpensive charge-coupled device (CCD) consumer cameras. The approach includes an economical data capture technique using inexpensive CCD cameras. Leveraging the smear feature of the CCD chip, we present a technique for synchronizing CCD cameras while capturing flame videos from different views. Our reconstruction is based on the radiative transport equation which enables complex phenomena such as emission, extinction, and scattering to be used in the rendering process. Both the color intensity and temperature reconstructions are implemented using the CUDA parallel computing framework, which provides real-time performance and allows visualization of reconstruction results after every iteration. We present the results of our approach using real captured data and physically-based simulated data. Finally, we also compare our approach against the other state-of-the-art flame volume reconstruction methods and demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our approach in four different applications: (1) rendering of reconstructed flames in virtual environments, (2) rendering of reconstructed flames in augmented reality, (3) flame stylization, and (4) reconstruction of other semitransparent phenomena.